The present application is in the context of operation and management of a 3rd generation partnership (3GPP) network. An area based MDT campaign designates an automatic collection of certain UE measurements and the transmission of the measurement results to the eNB, to enable easier monitoring of network performance and consequently to replace expensive drive tests performed manually by the operator. The UEs performing area based MDT measurements are selected by the eNodeB (eNB). If measurements are not activated in the UE, the eNB may activate them in the UE.
The eNB may select UEs for MDT data collection and transmission that fulfill the MDT selection criteria, which are determined mainly by radio access parameters such as the location of the UE. There is no criterion defined whether roaming users may be participating in the MDT data collection or not. If the terminal of a roaming user is MDT capable it may be automatically selected for an MDT session. Only local regulations may be considered but privacy aspects of the users are not taken into account.
However, for user privacy different regulations may apply to roaming users than for home users. E.g. for a US resident having US subscription roaming in other countries than USA, there may be a need to apply stricter regulations than for local subscribers. Thus, the local operator may unconsciously violate the roaming user's privacy.
However, in case of the present selection criteria for MDT selection such as the location area of the UE, where the UE selection is up to the eNB, the eNB does not know whether a given user is roaming or not.
One prior art solution proposed to indicate whether the user consent for MDT data collection and transmission has been given. However, it does not necessarily mean that the consent given at home network can be equally interpreted in visited network. Regulations on user privacy may differ in different countries and an indication of e.g. one bit received e.g. from a home subscription server (HSS) may be misused. Furthermore, asking for user consent every time before sending MDT configuration message would require involving a chain of CN-RAN interfaces between home PLMN (HPLMN) and visited PLMN (VPLMN), thus it would not be a very desirable solution. In addition, area based MDT usability would be seriously endangered, i.e. so far area based MDT aims to collect statistical data on network performance provided from randomly selected anonymous users, whereas by asking about user consent for every user each time before selection, the operator would have to somehow contact the user to get its “user consent”, introduce a lot of additional signalling and actually identify the user settings (violating his state of anonymity).